Ralph didn’t speak. It was Bunny who said gently, “Poor old Bim. I ran into him only the other day. It seems like a few hours.”
“He had a long life,” said Sandy, “as it’s going now.” Laurie could see that he was really distressed; his face was sharpened with it. Today he and Alec seemed closer and their friendship no longer unlikely. They reminisced together for a few minutes about Bim.
Bunny said, in the same gentle sickroom voice, “You met him, didn’t you, Laurie? At Alec’s the other night?”
“Yes. Only for a few moments.”
“No, of course I remember, he didn’t stay long. You swept him off, didn’t you, Ralph, to get some rest?”
Ralph said abruptly and rather loudly, “Well, someone had to. He was ill. He ought to have been in hospital.”
“Oh, I know,” said Bunny earnestly. Seeing Ralph about to get another drink, he took his glass and gave him one. “I remember you saying, Alec, if Ralph hadn’t taken over, Bim would have folded up in a couple of hours. It seems like fate, doesn’t it?”
“No,” said Alec in his clinical voice, “I didn’t say so. I’ve had training enough not to make that sort of cocksure prognosis.”
Staring at Bunny and forgetting to care if anyone noticed it, Laurie thought: How stupid he is; how does Ralph bear it? Of course he’s very good-looking, and I suppose … “I suppose,” he said, “the skies over Britain are full just now of fighter pilots who ought to be in nursing homes if they had their rights.”
“I’m surprised, really, they hadn’t grounded him,” Bunny said. “I expect they would have if he’d gone round the bend any further. What do you think, Alec?”
“I’ll save him the trouble of telling you,” said Ralph. His face had a heavy stiffness and his voice had gone flat and hard. “He thinks untrained people should mind their own—business, don’t you, Alec?”
Laurie looked at him puzzled. If it hadn’t been so clearly impossible—for the last three gins Bunny had given him would hardly have added up to one good double—one would have sworn he was getting drunk.
Alec didn’t rise to it. He had brownish eyelids with long dark lashes, under which his eyes slid around to look at Bunny for a moment. He spoke however to Ralph, with pleasant detachment. “Not in this instance, my dear. At least, I can assure you, you did precisely what I should have done if I’d had any influence with Bim, which I hadn’t.”
“Well,” said Ralph, “it seems that night he knew what he needed better than anyone else did. Too bad he got pushed around.” He gave Bunny his glass and said, “Not so much bloody bitters this time, Boo.”
Boo, thought Laurie. He looked at Ralph, who was beginning to have a fixed stare when he was not actually speaking. Boo. Well, good God, what business is it supposed to be of mine? He looked at his watch and got up.
“It’s on the half-landing,” said Ralph, rousing himself.
“Yes, I know, but I won’t come up again, I’ll have to catch my bus. Don’t get up, it’s all right.”
Ralph said, “What in blazes are you talking about? I’m driving you home.” He stared at Laurie as if he had been insulted and were waiting for an apology.
How can he be drunk? thought Laurie. I could take what he’s had myself and hardly feel it. He replied calmingly that of course Ralph wasn’t to turn out and that the bus went to the door.
“Sit down,” said Ralph, “and don’t talk crap. I’m driving you home and that’s the end of it.”
Laurie hesitated. As he did so, Bunny caught his eye and said, “Don’t worry, Laurie; it’ll be all right.” He sounded both kindly and confident. After all, thought Laurie, he should know.
On his way to the half-landing, where he retreated for a brief escape from all the tension upstairs, he knew that he was relieved not to be going yet. He hadn’t realized, till it came to the moment of saying goodbye, how much he had hated leaving Ralph after this news; in this awful flash room it was like abandoning him in a strange town or in a desert. One had to keep reminding oneself how very far from strange to him it really was, and that he wasn’t alone, either.
When Laurie got back, they were all discussing a recent blackmail case. Sandy and Alec had met someone who knew the victim, and had all the details, which were sordid enough. Remembering long discussions at Oxford, Laurie remarked that the present state of the law seemed to encourage that sort of thing; it was unenforceable, and merely created racketeers.
“I agree,” said Alec. “You could add that it gives the relatively balanced type, who makes some effort to become an integrated personality, a quite false sense of solidarity with advanced psychopaths whom, if they weren’t all driven underground together, he wouldn’t even meet.” He caught Sandy’s eye fixed on him reverently, and, as if he were giving way to a suppressed irritation, added, “Not that I can feel much pity for anyone who’ll submit to blackmail, myself.”
Sandy said at once, “No, really, that’s a bit sweeping, Alec. What about his job, what about dependents, what if his mother’s got a weak heart and the news will kill her? It’s not like you to be so rigid.”
“Oh, Sandy, we’ve been over this so often. It’s a matter of what your self-respect’s worth to you, that’s all. Isn’t that so, Ralph? In the first place, I didn’t choose to be what I am, it was determined when I wasn’t in a position to exercise any choice and without my knowing what was happening. I’ve submitted to psychoanalysis; it cured my stutter for me, which was very useful as far as it went. All right. I might still be a social menace, like a child-killer, and have to be dealt with whether I was responsible or not. But I don’t admit that I’m a social menace. I think that probably we’re all part of nature’s remedy for a state of gross overpopulation, and I don’t see how we’re a worse remedy than modern war, which from all I hear in certain quarters has hardly begun. Anyway, here we are, heaven knows how many thousand of us, since there’s never been a census. I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality. I’ve never involved a normal person or a minor or anyone who wasn’t in a position to exercise a free choice. I’m not prepared to let myself be classified with dope-peddlers and prostitutes. Criminals are blackmailed. I’m not a criminal. I’m ready to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point.”
Sandy looked quickly around the room for applause. “I only mean,” he said, “that you can’t always know what other people are up against. Of course, if normal sex were ever made illegal, you’d get decent married couples meeting each other in brothels and dives and getting tarred with the same brush.”
Ralph stirred, in what seemed a sudden uncontrollable annoyance. “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t let’s make blasted ostriches of ourselves. Anyone would think, to hear you and Alec talk, that being normal was immaterial, like whether you like your eggs scrambled or fried.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Alec temperately.
“That’s how you expect to be treated. Even civilized people had better hang on to a few biological instincts.” He had had to slow himself down to manage the last sentence without stumbling.
“It’s time they learned to be a bit more tolerant,” Sandy said.
“They’ve got children and they want grandchildren. Make you sick, the dirty bastards. So what? They’ve learned to leave us in peace unless we make public exhibitions of ourselves, but that’s not enough, you start to expect a medal. Hell, can’t we even face the simple fact that if our fathers had been like us, we wouldn’t have been born?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “In Athens we could have been.”
“Good old Spud,” said Ralph slowly and distinctly. “You’ll get yourself lynched if you don’t look out.” He leaned forward and tapped Laurie solemnly on the knee. “A lot of bull is talked about Greece by people who’d just have been a dirty laugh there. Not you, Spuddy. I’m not talking about you. You’d have got by.”